Palindrome Checker
A palindrome reads identically forwards and backwards once punctuation, spaces and capitalisation are ignored. "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" qualifies. Accents are normalised before comparison, so "Ésope reste ici et se repose" is correctly identified as a palindrome rather than rejected on the accent.
Type a word or phrase — the verdict updates instantly, entirely in your browser.
How the check actually works
A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards — but only once you ignore the formatting that makes it readable as a sentence. This checker normalizes first: it lowercases the text, strips accents down to their base letters, and removes everything that isn't a letter or a number (spaces, commas, colons, exclamation marks). What's left is compared against its own reverse, built with a code-point-safe method so multi-byte characters like emoji never get mangled mid-comparison. If the cleaned text equals its reverse, it's a palindrome.
Worked example
Type A man, a plan, a canal: Panama. After normalizing,
the checker compares amanaplanacanalpanama — 21
characters — against its own reverse. They match, so the verdict
reads "Yes — it's a palindrome," even though the raw text is full
of spaces, commas, and a colon that a naive character-by-character
comparison would trip over.
Frequently asked questions
Do spaces and punctuation count?
No. The checker strips everything except letters and numbers before comparing, so 'A man, a plan, a canal: Panama' is judged purely on its 21 letters — amanaplanacanalpanama — ignoring the spaces, comma, and colon. That's the standard definition of a phrase palindrome; a strict character-for-character comparison would fail almost every classic example.
Do accents matter?
No — the checker normalizes accented letters to their plain form before comparing (é becomes e, ñ becomes n), so accents never block a match. This matters for languages where palindromic phrases naturally include accented vowels.
What's a good example of a longer palindrome?
'Was it a car or a cat I saw' is a classic — 19 letters once spaces are stripped, reading identically in both directions. Single-word examples tend to be shorter and simpler, like 'racecar' or 'level', but phrase-level palindromes show the same idea can scale to a full sentence.
Are numbers allowed?
Yes — digits are treated the same as letters. '12321' or '2002' check out as palindromes exactly the way a word would, which is handy for spotting palindromic dates, serial numbers, or IDs.